page_title: John Singer Sargent
section_title: Relationships and personal life
hierarchical_section_title: John Singer Sargent / Relationships and personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Rosina Ferrara
context_page_description: John Singer Sargent was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.
  He was born in Florence to American parents, and trained in Paris before moving to London, living most of his life in Europe. He enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter. An early submission to the Paris Salon in the 1880s, his Portrait of Madame X, was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter in Paris, but instead resulted in scandal. During the next year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England where he continued a successful career as a portrait artist.
  From the beginning, Sargent's work is characterized by remarkable technical facility, particularly in his ability to draw with a brush, which in later years inspired admiration as well as criticism for a supposed superficiality.
context_section_description: Sargent was a lifelong bachelor with a wide circle of friends including both men and women to include Oscar Wilde (whom he was neighbors with for several years ), lesbian author Violet Paget , and his likely lover Albert de Belleroche. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent. However, recent scholarship has suggested that he was a homosexual man as he had devoted significant time to renderings of nude male figure studies. This view is based on his friends and associations; the overall alluring remoteness of his portraits; the way his works challenge 19th-century notions of gender difference; his previously ignored male nudes; and some nude male portraits, including those of Thomas E. McKeller, Bartholomy Maganosco, Olimpio Fusco, and that of the handsome aristocratic artist Albert de Belleroche, which hung in his Chelsea dining room. Sargent had a long friendship with Belleroche, whom he met in 1882 and traveled with frequently. A surviving drawing speculatively may hint that Sargent might have used him as a model for Madame X following a coincidence of dates for Sargent drawing each of them separately around the same time, and the delicate pose suggestive more of Sargent's sketches of the male form than his often stiff commissions.
  It has been suggested that Sargent's reputation in the 1890s as "the painter of the Jews". This may have been due to his empathy with, and complicit enjoyment of their mutual social otherness. There is much evidence to conclude Sargent's homosexuality; one such Jewish client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice Sargent "was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers". The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after Sargent's death that his sex life "was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger." There remains little doubt that Sargent was indeed attracted to men, sexually and most probably romantically as well.
  There were many friendships with women: it has been suggested that those with his sitters Rosina Ferrara, Amélie Gautreau, and Judith Gautier may have tipped into infatuation. As a young man, Sargent also courted for a time Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose.
  Sargent's friends and supporters included Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works from Sargent, and sought his advice on other acquisitions), Edward VII, and Paul César Helleu. His associations also included Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. Other artists Sargent associated with were Dennis Miller Bunker, James Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey and John Elliott (who also worked on the Boston Public Library murals), Francis David Millet, Joaquín Sorolla and Claude Monet, whom Sargent painted. Between 1905 and 1914, Sargent's frequent traveling companions were the married artist couple Wilfrid de Glehn and Jane Emmet de Glehn. The trio would often spend summers in France, Spain or Italy and all three would depict one another in their paintings during their travels.
caption: Rosina, 1878, depicting Rosina Ferrara
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